Chapter published in:
Persuasion in Public Discourse: Cognitive and functional perspectivesEdited by Jana Pelclová and Wei-lun Lu
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 79] 2018
► pp. 303–328
Persuasion in musical multimedia
A conceptual blending theory approach
I use the Conceptual Blending Theory to discuss the application of familiar music themes in unexpected contexts, where the music assists the image and text in swaying viewers’ opinion. A new interpretation emerges in such examples after two-tier conceptual blending. The musical themes initially integrate with the original (visual) context in listeners’ long-term memory, creating stable blends with predictable connotations. In the changed context, these blends become inputs in a new integration process, where the creators consciously play with listeners’ expectations: either by enhancing them, creating what blending theorists call the vital relation of analogy, or by disappointing them, creating the relation of disanalogy. I therefore integrate insights from cognitive linguistics and musicology in discussing the persuasive potentials of music.
Keywords: music, meaning, persuasion, conceptual blending, recursion, emergence
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.
Published online: 08 August 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.79.14ant
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.79.14ant
References
References
Agawu, Kofi
Antović, Mihailo
Antović, Mihailo, Dušan Stamenković, and Vladimir Figar
Antović, Mihailo, and Miloš Tasić
Bernstein, Leonard
Brandt, Line, and Per Aage Brandt
Brandt, Anthony and David Eagleman
Brower, Candace
Carlton, Lana, and Raymond A. R. Macdonald
Chattah, Juan Roque
Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner
Hatten, Robert S.
Hillman, Roger
Hsu, Hui-Chieh, and Lily I-wen Su
Huron, David Brian
Jackendoff, Ray, and Fred Lerdahl
Lu, Wei-lun
MacDonald, Laurence E.
Marshall, Sandra K., and Annabel J. Cohen
Mičić, Aleksandra
Pérez-Sobrino, Paula
Sayrs, Elizabeth
2003 “Narrative, Metaphor, and Conceptual Blending in ‘The Hanging Tree’.” Music Theory Online 9 (1): n.p. http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.03.9.1/mto.03.9.1.sayrs.html.
Swain, Joseph P.
Turner, Mark
Wilkie, Katie, Simon Holland, and Paul Mulholland
Zbikowski, Lawrence